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Puerta de la Selra,ooil on canvas |
Portrait of the artist as obsessed woman
Frances Marks, daughter of painter Grete Marks, talks to Simon Wroe about her mother who put her art before her family
LOOKING at Grete Marks’s delicate paintings of Spanish villages and the River Thames, it is hard to imagine a life of struggle, displacement and tragedy.
But behind the tranquil vistas and simple brushstrokes was a complex, driven woman who put her art before anything else, including her family. Seventeen years after Mrs Marks’s death, her daughter is curating a new exhibition of her oil paintings after the Second World War, and learning more about a difficult mother whom she often resented.
Frances Marks, who has lived in Quadrant Grove in Camden since 1975, remembers life with her mother as a struggle, where she was always superseded by art.
“I would sit on the banks of the Thames for hours on end while my mother painted, feeling rather bored,” she said. “I often felt like I was in the way. She was so obsessed with her painting; anything that stopped her was a problem.
“Many times I’d come home to find the kitchen filled with smoke and the supper burned to a crisp.”
Frances, who was born in 1941 after Grete fled to England to escape the Nazi regime, worked as a child psychologist until her retirement in 1997. It was an attempt, she says, to resolve some of her own difficulties with her mother.
She said: “We had a very poor relationship, at constant loggerheads. She was an upper class German woman living in working class London – a total eccentric – she would refer to my father and I as ‘goys’ and boss us about constantly.”
Grete Marks trained at the famous Bauhaus college under expressionist master Paul Klee in 1920-21, before becoming a potter.
Two years after college, she married Gustav Loebstein and together they founded the Hael Werkstatten pottery factory at Marwitz outside Berlin. When her husband died in a car crash in 1928, Grete brought in a manager and ran the factory herself, overseeing 120 employees.
But despite her tenacity, the rise of the Nazis and their anti-Jewish legislation in Germany had depleted sales figures for Jewish businesses and cast the export business into crisis, and in 1934 Grete was forced to sell the factory at a price greatly below market value.
A young woman called Hedwig Bollhagen took over the factory with the moulds and half finished products in situ, changing the initials to “HB” and omitting the word “kunstlerich” (artistic) to bring it into line with the Nazi politics of “Gleichschaltung” (synchronisation). Ironically, while many of HB’s first series was based on Mrs Marks’s designs, the Nazi authorities deliberately and publicly slandered Grete’s pottery in the years following her forced sale.
An article entitled ‘Jewish Ceramics in the Chamber of Horrors’, published in Goebbels’s propagandist paper ‘Der Angriff’ in May 1935, talks spitefully of the days of the Hael-Werkstatten. It describes how the factory was “abandoned” by fleeing Jews unconcerned about the unemployed and penniless workers they left behind, and only “saved” 14 months later when it was taken over by its new German owners.
The article describes the previous pottery made by Grete as “the product of a degenerate and misunderstood functionalism; its fitness for purpose had lost the simple healthy vernacular beauty that belongs to the German countryside and the German people.”
It accused “foreign forces” of influencing the design and sneered, “We shake our heads when we encounter the products brought by the post-war years… When the onlooker sees the noble forms in the adjacent rooms, one glance in the ‘Schreckenskammer’ (Chamber of Horrors) is enough to show him how far we have moved on.”
Marks escaped from Germany in 1936 and was brought to England by Ambroise Heal, the influential owner of Heal’s department store who had bought many of her products.
Heal even secured her work at the Minton pottery firm in Stoke, where she was given free rein to produce her own line of pottery. But artistic differences between her and her employers led to the contract being terminated.
Frustrated by the lack of adventure in British ceramics, she turned to painting. At first she restricted herself to watercolours of landscapes, until a gallery owner persuaded her that if she wanted her work to be recognised she would have to turn to oils.
After the war she moved to Crystal Palace in south London with her daughter and her second husband, Harold Marks. From here up until her death in 1990 she painted obsessively.
“She was only really content when she had a brush, crayon or palette knife in her hand,” says Frances, “I just accepted that her art was the most important thing in her life.”
Despite the tensions between mother and daughter while Grete was alive, Frances has developed a posthumous respect for her reclusive mother. “This was a woman with enormous drive, dispossessed and forced to find other ways to express herself in a foreign country,” she says. “Being involved in this exhibition and my mother’s estate, I’ve come to appreciate what an incredibly talented woman she was.”
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